From the Soviet collapse to “Sesame Street”
The “Sesame Street” spinoff set out to be the first Russian-language educational TV program aimed specifically at preschoolers. The project received support from both American and Russian government officials. “If we do not reform our education, we can hardly hope that we will reform our society,” said Elena Lenskaya, a director in Russia’s Ministry of Education, during a 1992 U.S. congressional hearing on the planned adaptation.
Yet the co-production endured a relentless slew of challenges, including financing woes, the invasion of its offices by armed soldiers and thorny conflicts as the cheery ethos and bold aesthetic of “Sesame Street” ran headlong into Russia’s rich, but markedly different, cultural traditions. Time and again, “Ulitsa Sezam” had to be salvaged from the brink of collapse by passionate teams on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s a tumultuous tale lovingly chronicled in Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia, a new book by American journalist, TV producer and filmmaker Natasha Lance Rogoff.
More than just a story of a children’s show, this book provides a valuable perspective of Russia’s people, their culture, and their complicated relationship with the West that remains relevant even today.
The Children’s Television Workshop (CTW)—now known as Sesame Workshop—recruited Rogoff to executive produce “Ulitsa Sezam” in 1993. Since her days reading Gogol and Dostoyevsky in high school, Rogoff had been enthralled by Russia. “I just thought that these writers were speaking to me,” she says.
In college, Rogoff moved to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) as an exchange student, ultimately becoming fluent in the Russian language. She spent more than ten years in the region, reporting for NBC News and CBS News, and illuminating life in the Soviet Union with documentaries like 1985’s “Rock Around the Kremlin,” which explored the underground Russian rock scene. She stayed in Moscow after the U.S.S.R.’s collapse to direct “Russia for Sale: The Rough Road to Capitalism,” a documentary spotlighting the struggles of everyday citizens during a period of great flux.
Though she had ample experience working in Russia, the job offer from the CTW gave Rogoff pause. She had never produced a kids’ television series, for one. She also wondered whether fuzzy cast of monsters on “Sesame Street,” beloved by American little ones, would similarly resonate with children of the former U.S.S.R.
